Marxist...boy, I walked RIGHT into that one without seeing it coming!

The proper role of government in a society is an argument that's been hashed over by brighter people than we are, and it wasn't settled then. Doubt you and me are going to pin it down here. If policy mistakes are to be made though, I would prefer the errors were in the direction of individual freedom instead of toward more concentration of centralized power. Used to be much of the Left had a strong anti-authoritarian bent...anybody remember "Smash the State?" It's decayed into standardized collectivism. Right now the Republicans are leaning toward freedom, at least in some areas, like economics. In other areas, there are some obvious authoritarian and statist trends that are disturbing. Still, to me they are currently the best of two viable choices.

The bottom line for me, political parties aside, is that our current government has gotten too powerful, and we need to start backing it up. How far we back up is open to discussion, but we need to start taking some of the power away.

I personally hoped that Harold Ford would end up leading the Democrats in the House. He seems to be exactly the kind of new blood the Democrats need. Badly. Getting past all the arguments, even you would have to admit there is a much more radical underpinning to the Democrats than there used to be. And political power has become an end in itself.

I don't want to see the Left Wing take over the Democrats completely any more than I would want to see the ultra-conservatives take over the Republicans. Whatever you may say about Bush, he's no Patrick Buchanan. God, I wish the libertarians could win a race or two now and then.

"What do they stand for RIGHT NOW?"



--Defense of the First, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, the Seventh, the Eighth...

I wish they would defend the Second.



I would REALLY like to see someone defend the Ninth and Tenth. Someday. Even the Republicans seem to have forgotten these.

--Prevention of the unrestricted aquisition and despoilment of natural resources by businesses who only have to answer to their stockholders and who don't think past the next quarterly report.

No one likes a clean environment more than I do. But the environmental movement isn't about cleaning up smokestacks and car exhausts, and making sure boaters have clean water, and fish have no mercury. Not anymore. Now it's about getting rid of any human interaction with the environment at all. It's about any change being bad. It's about not building ANYTHING. It isn't "Not In My Backyard." It's now "Not Anywhere At All." It's about politics now, not pollution, and setting up a particular specific political agenda, one that's anti-Western, anti-technology, and anti-American. And in the most extreme cases, anti-human. And this extremism is what is filtering into the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

A sensible environmental policy would be to insure that if you drilled oil wells, they would be clean and safe, in certain areas, and the oil companies would be held responsible for mistakes. Telling us we can't drill any new oil wells at all, no matter what, no matter where, is not useful.

--Open debate of foreign policy, which allows the public to participate, instead of a Capitol full of bobblehead dolls bouncing up and down.



...Well, it doesn't matter. Dissent will slowly be strangled in this country, and then you won't have to listen to anyone criticize the government anymore. It's in the cards. Perhaps I will see the tentative return of dissent when I'm eighty.



Behold, the world's smallest violin.

If Senators and Congressmen aligned eventually with Bush, it's because they figured more of their voters approved of that position than didn't. And to some extent, that's what it's about, isn't it? Even Wellstone, who--say what you will about his politics--had the guts to buck the trend in an election year, must have thought most of his constituents were on the same page he was.

No dissent? No public participation?? I don't know if you've been paying attention, but this country has been pretty much wall-to-wall dissent for months. In all the news, in all the magazines, and in the constant hammering of hundreds of web sites. I could stretch the "George W. Bush is an Asshole/Murderer/Idiot/etc./etc./etc." commentaries from here to the Moon and back. Cripes, we've pointed out dozens in our posts here alone.

Have you heard of even one of these web sites being forced off the Net? Even ONE? How many protest marchers have been permanently jailed? Heck, how many have even had their taxes audited? How many have even been inconvenienced? For all the wailing about how our precious right of free speech is in imminent danger, I don't see anything remotely of the sort happening at all. Some people have complained because they've been shouted down after expressing an opinion, but that's free speech too, not censorship.

Lord knows no one has shut you up yet!

(Thank goodness!)